Israel: Mixed blessings from a Trump administration

Israel’s right is celebrating Trump’s victory.

Newscom

America’s relationship with Israel could be about to enter a new golden age, said Isi Leibler in The Jerusalem Post. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump “literally gushes over Israel,” and has promised to revitalize an alliance that rotted under President Obama. Trump supports settlement construction in the West Bank, says he will move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and has pledged to terminate Obama’s “bogus nuclear deal” with Iran. Despite these pro-Israel credentials, many liberal American Jews have tried to tar Trump as an anti-Semite, accusing him of appointing a Jew hater, Steve Bannon, the former head of the right-wing Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. This is nonsense: Bannon surrounded himself with Jews at Breitbart, is a fierce critic of Obama’s appeasement of Iran and radical Islam, and “is known for his fervent support for Israel.” To smear him as an anti-Semite “is beyond the pale.”

“Like confession in the Catholic Church, support for Israel apparently absolves all sins,” said Chemi Shalev in Haaretz. And Bannon has committed many, many sins. According to a sworn statement by his ex-wife in 2007, Bannon once said that he didn’t like Jews and didn’t want his daughters going to school with “whiny” Jewish “brats.” During Bannon’s reign at Breitbart, the site ran articles referring to conservative commentator Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew” and to Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum as “a Polish, Jewish, American elitist.”

Why has Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is “usually quick to castigate any minute manifestation of anti-Semitism around the globe,” turned a blind eye to this poison? This should be a wake-up call to liberal American Jews, said Daniel Gordis in The Jerusalem Post. For years, they have adopted a “holier-than-thou” attitude toward our right-wing government and the occupation of the West Bank. But now that liberalism is under frontal attack in the U.S., it is time for them to end the “preaching and moralizing.” Let us reassert an ancient truth: “We are one people, and when we stop feeling and expressing that, we flirt with existential danger.”

The Israeli right would be wise to calm its excitement about Trump, said Itamar Eichner in Yedioth Ahronoth. High-ranking Israeli officials who know the president-elect say that he is “completely pro-Israel” and note that his son-in-law and chief adviser, Jared Kushner, is Jewish. But they also told me that Trump is “impulsive and impossible to predict.” On the campaign trail, he said that Israel would need to pay for the security assistance it receives from the U.S. Trump later walked back this statement, “but the red flags have been raised.” Worryingly, the officials said they couldn’t rule out a scenario in which Trump would use Israel as a bargaining chip with another major power, such as Russia. “In other words, he will put America’s interests first.”